Noble Six Hundred
by Nothing To See Here Carry On
Summary: They're still there, and so is S.H.I.E.L.D. and really, that's all that matters. [The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division before, during, and after the war; through the eyes of its personnel who swore to protect it.]


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" _The **Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Divisional Infantry**_ _, more commonly known as the **S.H.I.E.L.D. Infantry Division** , **SHIELD-DI5** , the **D.I,** or simply **The Infantry** , is the paramilitary and rapid-response protection bureau of S.H.I.E.L.D., a United States extra-governmental military counter-terrorism and intelligence agency, tasked with maintaining global security._

 _The Infantry Division is the 'Armed' section of S.H.I.E.L.D., a paramilitary force utilized as the "First and Last Line of Defence_ _" for S.H.I.E.L.D. and it's global interests. Operating separate to the Intelligence Division of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Infantry Division, according to it's origin cause, is tasked primarily with the defence of S.H.I.E.L.D and it's interests, and the prosecution and elimination of its opponents through various sanctioned and non-sanctioned functions, including the promotion of S.H.I.E.L.D. agendas, protecting S.H.I.E.L.D. scientific and economic interests, integral personnel protection, emergency services, special ceremonies, and the guard of important areas. In short, "SHIELD Protects the World and Infantry Protects SHIELD" is the Infantry Division's primary mantra._ "

\- "The History of the S.H.I.E.L.D: Divisional Infantry, Preface", The S.H.I.E.L.D. Cadet Handbook 2016-2017, page 04.

|✯| **NOBLE SIX HUNDRED** |✯|

S.H.I.E.L.D. INFANTRY SERVICE ACADEMY, UTAH. JULY, 20.

|︾|

Despite having found its feet in the United States, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Divisional Infantry had always, since the beginning, suffered from a strange European fashion when it came to their parade ground flair.

Of course, S.H.I.E.L.D. was a global conglomerate was much as it was a Western one. Decades of recruitment from different countries had long since diversified the Infantry, with hundreds of different nationalities with their own twists and quirks subtly changing the everyday style without anyone taking notice, until you took a step back, that is, and the full force of three dozen languages and at least a twenty different military styles hit you in the face at once. It was part of the charm. _Trooperstyle_ , was the term.

But the Troopers themselves, though. There is one very odd, very distinct behavior. Call them to attention and they all jerked their heads up to the right. Unless their commanding officer happened to be on the left, in which then the unspoken consent was to turn to the left as well — it mattered little. They never looked forward.

Coulson, once, had the terror of wondering what he did wrong when he called to a Trooper and they immediately looked away. Thankfully, the Trooper had explained it to him afterward, but hell, it had gave him one hell of a pause at the time.

It was an interesting little habit, though, one that, come the first Anniversary of S.H.I.E.L.D's restoration, was picked up fairly quickly by WHiH Newsfront. For the first time, the traditional pass out parade that the S.H.I.E.L.D. Divisional Infantry recruits participated in after basic training was to be both attended by the Director _and_ televised. Ordinarily, the whole ceremony was a twenty minute affair that stretched from the Service Academy's main gate to the nearby runway, but the ceremony was extended by virtue of being the first year of the aptly named Next Generation of S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel and, having lost nearly eighty-percent of their men during the proceeding conflict, the surviving Troopers' own decision to march with the recruits, as one united force.

It was six battalions of over four hundred men each. Pitiful compared to the amount of Troopers S.H.I.E.L.D. had before New York, but Coulson had to admit, even with the drastically smaller force; there was something about nearly two-thousand-seven-hundred heavily-armoured soldiers wielding assault rifles marching in unison that was both beautiful and striking.

Director Mace couldn't have asked for a better publicity narrative.

Even if he had to explain to some journalist that, no, the Troopers weren't disrespecting American 'Vets by showing frankly bizarre foreign practices; half of them _were_ Vets, but only a third of them American. Fury had made a critical error for waiting until New York for the Avengers to debut; it made them appear American and, by extension, S.H.I.E.L.D. True, they were based in the United States, yes, but it's personnel came from around the world — and their behavior reflected their allegiance, not to their countries but to humanity as a whole. At least eighty percent of their armed force was bilingual. The fact that Agent-General Tatham was saluting with his fist to his chest (another thing that had been picked up by Infantry, turns out; from forty-degree angle salutes to chest thumping, the style had changed in little more than a year and appeared to have been picked up by everyone _but_ Coulson) only solidified the rhetoric.

Coulson was acting Field Commander; he should, and would if he were able, have been up there with the Director. However, that was the disadvantage of death. With the cameras prowling the scene, Coulson hung back on the sidelines, wearing a set of fatigues, half-disguised by a helmet. Standing in the crowd was the original idea, but in the end, the risk won out. It was better to stand behind Tatham dressed as a S.H.I.E.L.D. Trooper than to miss out the entire thing, or stand off to one side and risk getting put on film. Gonzales, his predecessor, never had this issue, of course; the old Field Commander, God bless him, made a point to attend every major Infantry event. Back in his day, he even supported some of his Troopers when they were pulled up to against the Infantry Office of Investigations and Judiciary despite being stationed in the middle of the ocean on an aircraft carrier.

For what ultimately affected his men, effected Gonzales.

And Robert Gonzales, despite his flaws, was seen as a competent and well-respected leader for it.

He had a big set of shoes to fill, Coulson knew. The fact that Gonzales' old insignia had been adapted into the new Infantry emblem only confirmed it. Attending a Pass Out wasn't much, but it was a step in the right direction.

"They'll appreciate it," Tatham told him. S.H.I.E.L.D. did not have a dress uniform for its Infantry, due to ceremonies being almost non-existent in S.H.I.E.L.D. barring the time when one took their oath, so the General had to stand in the same fatigues and body armor as everyone else. Although, this was also the man who'd slugged it out in the Syrian desert in full combat gear; he wasn't fazed, and he watched Coulson's own discomfort with something akin to tender amusement. "You've already done more than others."

'Others' being Fury, of course. Tatham didn't say it on account of Coulson being his former subordinate — which was quite frankly polite knowing the usual Anti-Intelligence Trooper spiel — but there was no one else he could have meant.

Fury had never attended these Pass Outs. He'd been an Intelligence man, a spymaster; the Troopers did not interest him. Coulson had to wonder if he was watching them today, either from the crowd or on TV, from wherever he happened to be; even if it was under the impression of keeping an eye on Mace. It didn't seem like much. Standing still for an hour as the Troopers marched by took a chunk out of Coulson's afternoon at the very worst, so what excuse Fury had, he really didn't know — only that it came to bite him, badly, when S.H.I.E.L.D. fell.

After Gonzoles and Coulson and now, Mace, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Infantry Division would never fall behind Fury again. That much was clear. After years of subtle disinterest and chronic underfunding, they knew who their support was, and it wasn't in Fury's leadership.

He couldn't have done anything against HYDRA more than he had, of course, but that didn't change the fact that there were forty-three battalions dead in the ground; over seven thousand Troopers. Someone had to take the blame, and Fury had held back on intelligence when he knew it would save lives.

That much was clear.

Still, bad history aside, things were going... well, for the Divisional Infantry. It made Coulson happy in that warm, intuitive way that was becoming an increasingly rare occurrence the older he got and the more crazy stuff he witnessed. Everything was going better than anyone could have expected.

Tatham though, it turned out, had as much of an aversion to the cameras as Coulson did. When the Troopers made it to the hangers and out of sight, ceremony over, the General hightailed it before Mace and his constant media presence could find his way to their location. Coulson, stunned by the sunlight and the heavy kevlar crushing his ribs, blindly stomped after the Agent-General in boots that felt too big, feeling lightheaded and overheated.

"Holy shit," Daisy grinned when she caught sight of him. "Hold up, let me get a photo." She had a polaroid camera, that weird kind that had recently made a comeback for some reason Coulson couldn't quite comprehend. He watched her run over from where she had spent the ceremony, observing proceedings out of sight from under a set of bleachers and, stifling a sigh, he suffered for a few minutes as she took some shots. It was all in the name of fun, after all, and things had been rough, recently... So he let her have it. After all, it could have been much worse.

Tatham snorted as he unclipped his helmet.

"I've had enough photos done for a few hundred lifetimes," he muttered dryly when Daisy threatened to take a shot of him and, as an afterthought, plonked the helmet on her head as he wandered away. "Knock yourself out," he conceded in compromise and gave Coulson an absent little wave before whistling sharply and throwing one hand up over his shoulder, making a circular motion with his finger.

From seemingly nowhere, a squad of Troopers all ambled after him, hurriedly. They were young ones, Coulson realized. Fresh recruits. A disorganized clumsy clatter of ceramic plating, rubber boots and weapons.

Daisy pushed back the camera with her arm's outstretched forward as possible to take a photo of herself, duck-face all the way. "I dunno," she eyed Coulson when he semi-glared in her direction, pushing up Tatham's oversized helmet from where it fell over her eyes. "I'm sure May'd love the military look, DC."

"I doubt it," Coulson sighed. He wasn't built for a uniform. He barely looked right in suits, let alone three-inch kevlar lining. "Let's get out of here. I'm dying in this thing."

The response from his, again, unseen audience was surprising, to say the least.

"OOYAH!" A trio of passing Troopers who overheard them all saluted as one, fists presented against their armored torso. "Aint no armor like S.H.I.E.L.D. armor!"

In response, Coulson rolled his eyes.

But he smiled all the same.

|✯| **N600** |✯|

Because, in the end, there were many of them who couldn't.

Little brother, first to leave. That was the way it worked. David was never like his older brother Nicolas, who made it all the way into Tactical. For in the Infantry, you Pass Out (no more graduation — it's uniform and rifle and soldier, now) as soon as your twelve weeks at the Service Academy are up. That means David, who is two years younger than Nicolas, ends up deployed in the most empty, most dangerous region of bādiyat ash-shām with Batallion IIV and the rest of Company Delta while his older brother still has a year to go at the Academy.

It means David is nineteen years old and he's already seen one of his fellow squadmates get his legs blown off at the knee. It means he learns how to _really_ throw a grenade; that aiming for cars is better because the collateral damage widens the range of impact.

David is nineteen and when he shoots a man dead, it's not like in training, with ballistic gel, clear and cool. It's red and hot and the bodies don't just fall — they defecate and jerk around and make noises, choking and wheezing, air escaping from hopeless lungs. Sometimes they don't die at all, and David has to leave them to it, alone, because time is precious and best not wasted.

He doesn't think anything of it, though, until he gets notice of Nicolas' own graduation ceremony, where his older brother speak his oath in front of the Academy Director and get presented with his badge (David got his the standard way, in the mail with a written recommendation and congratulation from the Field Commander and the Agent-General of the Divisional Infantry — he lost both maybe a month or so into deployment; but he managed to keep the tags) and David ends up scrubbing away the sand and filth, trimming his nails down to the quick to remove nearly ten months worth of combat. He stinks of gasoline and gunpowder and smoke, and it sticks to his nose even after he's been rubbed pink and clean, rinsed off with cologne and done up in a suit that he can't remember to wear because it's not a uniform, it's not a _uniform_.

In the time it takes for his darling older brother to impress a Tac team and find himself graduating, David has learned truths that no one should have to witness. He's obliterated towns after Agents have completed their operations _just in case_ , or worse, he's stabbed and shot and patched up wounds with nothing but superglue and duct tape and the further he goes the more he has to peel back the ugly surface of the world and stare right into it's decaying soul.

Three weeks after that, Nicolas manages to fight off his entire HYDRA-turned team members and staggers onto the Iliad with the rest of the loyalist survivors, soaked in blood and scowling. David, when he is informed from the darkest, grayest chunk of mountainside in Ukraine where he oversees around fifty odd men, swears and shouts and punches a fist through his monitor because his brother made it out alive.

(Not for long though, of course; when the Inhumans attack and the Iliad burns, so does Nicolas — he's 5426th in the list of dead.

David is no so lucky. He's twenty-three and only five of his fifty odd men made it out with him; he's Commander, now and he's... Alive. Still alive.)

Still. He marches down with the new batch of recruits on Pass Out with the rest of them, stood three feet in front of the remaining bulk of Batallion IIV in salute, because they're still there, and so is S.H.I.E.L.D. and really, that's all that matters.


End file.
